Black ink fine line drawing on grey paper of a radial mandala of looping lines, spirals, an eye and dotted rays, with no placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Radial line-loop mandala design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing is a symmetrical, radiating design built from continuous black line loops, interlocking S-shaped curls and small spirals arranged around a centre. An eye motif sits at the top, a small om-like symbol appears at the lower right, and short dotted rays extend outward between the motifs. It is rendered in black ink on a light grey textured background with no colour.

Fine line Geometric Mandala Spiral Eye Loop Dot Om symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the sheet folded inside a tartan flask that has sat unclaimed on the lost property shelf since March. It is tracing paper, gone soft as a handkerchief, and someone has drawn a wheel on it in black ink: loops knotted over loops, curls that turn back on themselves like bracken, a single eye at the top with a burst of short lines above it. Between the motifs run little dotted rays, and at the lower right sits a tiny spiral with a tail, the sort a child copies from a comic. The last Leeds train grumbles past the window, and the glass hums with it.

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Your colleague Dilys leans over your shoulder with her cardigan buttoned wrong. "That's Mrs Hadley's," she says. "Every Thursday for years she sat on bench four with that flask and a biro, drawing on whatever paper she had. Said the eye was for the signal box, so nothing got past it." You count the dotted rays. There are twelve, and each one ends near a loop that sits where a platform number would be, and you realise the drawing is a timetable she made for herself, a way of telling the hours without a clock face.

Nobody came for the flask. Dilys says the family moved to Carlisle in the spring and wrote to say to keep whatever was left. You fold the sheet along its old crease and sit with it for a while, following the loops with your finger the way you would follow a line of print, until the platform clock catches up with the drawing and the last train of the night pulls away empty.

Before you shelve the flask you take a pencil from the drawer and add one more ray, short and dotted, pointing at the empty bench. Then you put the sheet back inside, screw the lid down tight, and write a label for whoever comes next.